No one ever pays attention when you’re handed a flyer at the fringe. It’s only when I take a proper look that I realise I haven’t been handed a promotion but a protest. Offered with a smile, the leaflet is designed to look like medical information but warns, avidly, against the dangers of drag, LGBTQ+ sex education and “what they’re teaching our children”. Too flustered to be angry, I give it back, politely (too politely) tell the gathered group I disagree with them, and run to the show I’m late for.
At this year’s Edinburgh fringe, LGBTQ+ artists have made the majority of the joyful, audacious, uplifting work I’ve been lucky enough to see. In fact, this is such an overtly queer-positive festival that while the blatant anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation is at first deflating, it then feels almost ridiculous. Good luck being heard above all this gloriously gay noise.
Birthmarked (★★★★) is a beautiful example of how to deal with those who reject you. What starts as a stage full of grey suits quickly becomes a glittering, high-heeled spectacle of camp. Told through gig-theatre, this is Brook Tate’s remarkable personal story of having grown up in a devout Jehovah’s Witness community, being dis-fellowshipped for being gay, and cut off from the family he was still living with.
With sincerity, generosity and glorious cheek, Tate and his beautiful band sing to us – and a visiting whale, a beautiful, billowing beast – their music bursting with revelation. Brought up believing he shouldn’t trust anyone who was not a Witness, Tate becomes an apostate by speaking out in this show. Yet there is an extraordinary lack of contempt for the community that abandoned him. Instead, the performance exudes a gratitude for all he has gained since leaving, making space to lament the members of his family who remain trapped in the narrative they have been told.
Another show with the community of music at its core is Public: The Musical (★★★★), a silly premise carried out with the utmost style. Created by queer-led company Stroud & Notes, it finds four strangers trapped in a public toilet. Forced to talk to each other until the maintenance man lets them out, they grate against each other’s disparate personalities, identities and beliefs until they can eventually confront their own obstacles and gently unearth some common ground.
This is one of many queer shows at Pleasance that form part of this year’s festival buzz; the venue seems to be leading the way with LGBTQ+ work. With charmingly funny lyrics (“I’d take an aggressive UTI over small talk”) and perfect pipes, Public is a surprisingly moving and entirely joyful experience. It is a welcome reminder that differences are possible to overcome and minds are able to change.
“Will you do me a favour,” asks Charli Cowgill as I stand in the queue. “Will you spit in this cup?” Bright pink and slick with liquid, 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals (★★★★) is brutally revealing and beautifully soft, with a brazen approach to every kind of bodily fluid. Friends Cowgill and Laurie Ward interviewed dozens of trans women, compiling their varying experiences of their bodies, sex, and how they have been treated by both partners and strangers. Stories of assault glide seamlessly into the aching desire to have a child and conversations of sex as sacred. The result is an intimate yet expansive, extraordinarily raw performance.
It’s the details that are so striking: Cowgill being given vocal coaching to sound “more like a woman”, which actually involves being told to speak less; the vile, violent messages Ward received from a man when she was just 19, read out in full; the joy – and rarity – of seeing other trans women just hanging out in a restaurant. In the telling of it, the pair swap stories, holding each others’ words in their mouths with total trust, one friend’s head cradled gently in the lap of the other.
Friendship is also the focus of Cowboys and Lesbians (★★★), a longing-fuelled story of teenage angst and first love. Worrying that they haven’t really lived, two well-behaved teenagers (Julia Pilkington and Georgia Vyvyan) fret that their lives are boring. As an antidote, they tell each other a story, their escapist fantasies forming a hilariously hammy tale of a lonely ranch girl (Vyvyan, eyelids aflutter) and the aloof but extraordinarily handsome cowboy (“Rugged but pretty enough that even the queer girls can be involved,” winks Pilkington, hair slicked back).
Building their innocently sultry story between physics classes, the duo start to figure out their own feelings and what they’re struggling to say to each other. Though the structure becomes a little repetitive, this theatre debut from writer Billie Esplen is incredibly tender, fuelled by the hopeful urges of early understandings of queerness and the desperate desire to be kissed.
Adding a healthy dose of the unhinged, Lachlan Werner: Voices of Evil (★★★★) is a fiendish ventriloquist act worth selling a soul for. A shit-stirring witch puppet has total control over the silent Lachlan, our pale-faced twink whose every movement has the audience cracking up. With hilarious hip rolls and effortless crowd work, the witch invites us to a ritual to sacrifice a virgin, to Werner’s wide-eyed terror. The show becomes darker and more lurid as our sweet, shy boy becomes embroiled with seducing a demon. Werner is such an extraordinary ventriloquist that when he and the witch sing a duet, I am briefly confused as to why he doesn’t pass the mic over to her.
Even more hungrily, wonderfully vulgar is The Kaye Hole (★★★★), Reuben Kaye’s late-night cabaret of debauchery. Before we’ve even taken our seats, he’s scrolling through dick pics with us, looking stunning in his blood-red, tight minidress offering a faceful of cheek. The Australian performer is the most exquisite host for his guests comprising comedians, musicians and wildly strange performance artists; the evening serves as a magnificent pick-of-the-fringe event.
Tonight, we have the pleasure of Sikisa’s comedy and burlesque performance (not at the same time; Sikisa points out that having people laugh at you while you take your clothes off isn’t everyone’s ideal) and Jarred Dewey’s sensual trapeze act, complete with gleaming red heels. We finish with perhaps the strangest act at the fringe: Tara Boom, a naked, butter-slathered hula hooper with a plugged-in machine on her head burping out popcorn. The midnight crowd can barely contain themselves.
The abundance and variety of queer work on display at this year’s fringe is exhilarating. It’s easy to focus on the injustices and inequalities that still abound, but it’s far more pleasing to celebrate the fearless, pioneering performers challenging expectations, tackling misinformation and spreading total joy. I think again of the people spending their days at the fringe handing out the anti-LGBTQ+ leaflets, and think of the beauty, community and utterly irreplaceable experiences they could have been having during this festival instead.
Birthmarked is at Assembly Rooms until 27 August. Public – The Musical is at Pleasance Courtyard until 28 August. Cowboys and Lesbians is at Pleasance Dome until 27 August. Lachlan Werner: Voices of Evil is at Pleasance Courtyard until 27 August. 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals is at Pleasance Courtyard until 28 August. The Kaye Hole Hosted by Reuben Kaye is at Assembly George Square Gardens on 23 August and Assembly Checkpoint, 24-26 August.
